Earlier this year, Elizabeth Economy—senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and senior advisor at the Commerce Department—published a book on China’s long-term plans. In The World According to China, she offers a perspective on why and how China aims to displace the US as the predominant leader in the world.
She explains how China’s president Xi Jinping is focused on the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” To achieve this, China seeks to make authoritarianism sound like a plausible alternative to democracy. It also seeks to legitimize—and even make sound normal—the concept of state-determined rights instead of inalienable individual rights. China uses three kinds of power to push its ambitions. Soft power includes expanding state-owned media outlets in Africa and Latin America. Hard power includes squelching dissent in Hong Kong, building airstrips in the South China Sea to intimidate Taiwan, and opening a military logistics base in Djibouti. Sharp power includes forcing corporations doing business in China to hew the line on China’s vision of things (e.g., that Taiwan is part of China), and forcing corporate technology transfer.
In World Leadership, I describe these tactics as foreign reach and military strength, two of the four leadership power sources, with population and wealth being the other two. China has consistently had programs that develop all four power sources, to include manipulating its population with a Three-child policy, and using protectionism to build wealth that stays within China.
To respond to China’s rising position, Economy suggests that the US reassert itself on the world stage. She also calls for the US to embrace immigration as a way to maintain US technological competitiveness, and to partner with “like-minded allies.” These sound like modest forms of the regionalism that I describe in World Leadership. The world order is being reshaped in front of our eyes, and actions taken today will set the stage for future generations. The US needs a strategic plan, as ambitious as China’s, to counterweight China’s growing influence.
Source: Dexter Roberts, “China’s True Ambitions, and What They Mean for the US,” 30 January 2022, B8; see also https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/01/28/chinas-true-ambitions-what-they-mean-us/
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